Prize for Literature

Soon after being named winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature in October, Italian actor-playwright Dario Fo demonstrated to the world how he had secured his reputation as a social agitator. He announced that his $1 million Nobel award would be donated to the legal defense of three former radicals who were imprisoned for a murder associated with an incident that formed the centrepiece of one of his best-known satires, Morte accidentale di un anarchico (1974; Accidental Death of an Anarchist). The play tells of an anarchist who was unjustly blamed for terrorist bombings and during police interrogation was thrown from a fifth-story window to his death--a death that was ruled accidental. The police interrogators, led by the main character, Il Matto (“The Maniac”), beat the suspect and brought him to the window “and made him lean out for a bit of cool night air to revive him . . . Apparently, there was a misunderstanding between the two officers supporting him as often happens in these cases, each of them thought the other one was holding him--‘You got him Gianni?’ ‘You got him Luigi?’ and bump, down he went.” In the real-life 1969 case, the government destroyed evidence relating to the bombing, and the three radicals for whom Fo lent his celebrity support were convicted of the 1972 assassination of the chief interrogator. They were demanding a new trial, however.

The selection of the avant-garde dramatist and performer came as a surprise to many Nobel Prize watchers, including Fo himself, and the inter-national literary establishment reacted somewhat coolly to the news. Partially blinded by a stroke in 1996, Fo brought characteristic levity to the staid Nobel ceremony in December by handing out colourful drawings and delivering an improvised speech. His risky theatrical caricatures lampooned what he viewed as hypocrisy in government, society, and religion and were occasionally the subject of official condemnation. The Vatican, for example, censured his popular one-man show, Mistero Buffo (1973) as “the most blasphemous show in the history of television” for such irreverent scenes as the one in which Jesus Christ transforms the wedding at Cana into a drunken bacchanal. Based on medieval mystery plays, Mistero Buffo remained topical, changing with every audience. Fo’s biting brand of comedy was perhaps best described in a monologue from the same work: “I am the jongleur . . . I make fun of those in power, and I show you how puffed up and conceited are the big shots who go around making wars in which we are the ones who get slaughtered. I reveal them for what they are. I pull out the plug, and pssss they deflate.”

Fo was born on March 24, 1926, in Leggiuno-Sangiamo, a fishing village north of Milan, the city where he later settled. By the early 1950s he was creating satirical revues for small theatres, often appearing with the actress Franca Rame, whom he married in 1954. Their agitprop theatre of leftist politics was rooted in the traditions of commedia dell’arte and court jesters, and when their clownish sketches on the television show “Canzonissima” lasted only seven weeks in 1962, their notoriety was fueled. In 1968 Fo and Rame founded the acting troupe Nuova Scena, which was financed by the Italian Communist Party. They left the party in 1970, however, to establish the touring company Collettivo Teatrale La Comune.

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